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Southwestern Historical Quarterly

may have ruined the political ambitions of Ben Barnes but she was surelyineffective in the gubernatorial run-off against Dolph Briscoe. In turn, thetitle of this work also implies that Texas voters threw out not only the"rascals" but also their philosophy. Nothing could be farther from the truth:Dolph Briscoe represents the same rural-oriented conservative thinking asPreston Smith.Deaton has therefore fashioned a work of limited historical and politicalsignificance. His style is journalistic, riddled with cliches and colloquialisms.Typically, "seeds of corruption" spouted "into poisonous vines" (p. 24);the "New Year of 1972 crept on the Texas political scene" (p. 25); andFarenthold's "breath was hot on the neck of Ben and Dolph" (p. io6).Oftentimes too close to his subject, he refers to the principal participantssimply as Ben, Sissy, Dolph, and Preston. In fact, The Year They Threwthe Rascals Out tends to be textbookish, relating the story of the Sharpstownscandal, the state political contests of 1972, and the failures and successesof the sixty-second and sixty-third Texas legislatures in an adumbratedform.Texas Christian University BEN PROCTERProgressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era. ByLewis L. Gould. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Pp. xvi+339. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $ o.)Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, Peter Filene's "Obituary for theProgressive Movement" may have been premature. Since Filene's articleappeared in 197o David P. Thelan and Lewis L. Gould have successfullyemployed progressivism as an organizing theme for monographs on twen-tieth-century politics in Wisconsin and Texas, respectively. In Progressivesand Prohibitionists Gould shows that during the Wilson era prohibitionbecame "the major divisive element" separating Texas progressives fromconservatives (p. xiii). Of course, the linkage between drys and progressiveswas not complete, as Gould's account of Democratic factionalism makesclear." How did the crusade against Demon Rum achieve such status in the LoneStar state? Earlier anticorporation campaigns had "settled" some of theeconomic issues raised by progressives elsewhere. In addition, the presenceof substantial German- and Mexican-American minorities fueled ethnocul-tural conflict, of which prohibition became the chief symbol. ProfessorGould mentions but does not elaborate on another cause: disfranchisementhad already removed from the electorate many of those Texans, black andwhite, who had in previous decades demanded economic reform.